At the same time we face the vast, unprecedented challenge of climate change. Modern industrial society has caused a massive and rapid change in the composition of our atmosphere. This is raising global temperatures, expanding oceans, melting icecaps and glaciers, and altering seasonal weather patterns. The result is worsening drought and fire, flooding events, more frequent extreme-weather events, unpredictable crop yields and crop diseases, all of which lead to food insecurity. We are now perilously close to a series of tipping-points that could cause runaway climate change, when the ecosystems (like Arctic tundra and deep-seabeds) that store ‘greenhouse gases’ and those (like tropical forests) that remove them from the atmosphere are pushed out of long-term equilibrium.
We can only avoid these catastrophes, and the looming impacts of existing climate change (such as ocean acidification), by immediate and profound changes in how we live - by a great turning towards low-carbon living and ecological restoration.